Star Trek: The True Story

Star Trek: The True Story was a documentary produced by and broadcast on the Discovery Channel in the US on 5 January2013 as the 29th episode of their "The True Story" documentary series. It was also broadcast in the UK by Channel 5 on 9 May2013. Running for 45 minutes, the documentary broached the subject of Star Trek from two angles. First, it chronicled in broad strokes the genesis of the franchise, from the inception of Star Trek: The Original Series through cancellation and resurgence in syndication and subsequent fandom, to its rebirth in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The second approach was the discussion of the current state of both the theoretical and practical development of the various scientific basic principles, that served, as per Gene Roddenberry's dictum, as a believable basis at the time for The Original Series. For the second approach, several real-world scientists were interviewed, not a few of them unabashedly admitting they went into their chosen field of profession because of Star Trek: The Original Series.

As is currently commonplace with productions of the Discovery Channel, some of the events discussed in regard to the early history of the franchise were re-enacted with the use of actors portraying the main principals, Gene Roddenberry and Herb Solow in this case. Roddenberry received a somewhat more critical treatise than usual, as more of his human fallacies and shortcomings during those years were highlighted, which, however, was met with sympathy by his son, Rod Roddenberry, who stated in the documentary that it helped him to humanize the picture he had of his late father.